The Toy Box: A Yuuya Kizami Story
by m0nek0
Summary: A story about a boy and his rabbit. Warning for descriptions of animal cruelty.


_"_ _Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."_

Thucydides

* * *

 **Wouldn't you like to be extricated from your pain?**

 **Don't you want to live?**

 **Convince me. Expose yourself.**

 **Show me how much you want it.**

 **...**

1999.

A few months prior to his eighth birthday he stumbled upon a small alcove tucked away deep in a secluded area of a local forest. Naturally it became his very own place, his very own kingdom. No one could pester him or tell him what to do, and neither his brother, nor his sister, nor the two people he called his parents, nor anyone else could follow him there and witness the things he did in secret, under cover of the dense foliage of the wilderness. The vegetation, the rocks, the soil, the animals— everything in his line of sight fell under his power, and furthermore, one day he decided his primeval hideout was a swell enough place to have a fun time as any other. And so that is where Yuuya Kizami brought the rabbit.

It was an awfully dry summer day. He had been alone exploring some nearby backwoods path with a burlap-colored knapsack slung over his shoulder and a translucent plastic bottle filled halfway with some sort of clear liquid strapped snugly to his hip which made a muffled slap against the side of his thigh after each step. The bunny was scampering about in a shallow ditch adjacent to the trail when Yuuya first saw it, and it saw him, and it looked him directly in his eyes and stopped in its tracks. He had never seen a wild rabbit around there before. It was only slightly bigger than his hand. Maybe it's a shelter escapee, or possibly someone's pet, he thought as he cautiously walked in its direction, which is all the better. He smiled at it, and motioned for it to come closer. Surely, the more comfortable the life it had had the more visceral the reaction would be. He had recently again been yearning to play with another live animal, and this was practically an invitation. Then it turned and hopped away into the underbrush and it was time for the hunt.

Most people would not have given much thought upon seeing the boy. He looked ordinary in most regards. However, the rabbit felt a very foreboding, terrible force pulsating down upon it. His smile was warm and inviting and vacant and cold all at the same time. The animal dashed forward, opposite the unrecognized human, heart pounding, and then went left, and then northeast in a zigzagging motion, scuttling through several meters of dead leaves and broken branches before finally gravitating towards a small clearing. It began to promptly survey the unfamiliar landscape when it heard a branch crack in the far-off distance, followed by what sounded like rapid footsteps, and it paused, hesitant to proceed ahead, unaware of a pair of frosty gray eyes leering eagerly from behind in the bushes. A towering column of shadow approached its back, growing steadily over the animal and it became aware of this just in time to hear a soft thump and swish of liquid but by that time it was too late for the she-rabbit. Yuuya scooped it up in an embrace at an almost inhuman speed, wordlessly clamping his hand over its muzzle and starting to contort it in-between his arms. The bunny jerked its mouth free of the hand covering its face and started to scream.

The cry of a rabbit is a peculiar sound that many people never have the pleasure of hearing firsthand in their lifetimes. Yuuya was no longer a stranger to it. He would have described it as something akin to an amalgamation of the wail of a newborn human and the blaring of a car alarm. Eventually it started to agitate him. The rabbit was squirming too much, and it wouldn't shut up, and it had the audacity to bite him on the hand, so he ended up throwing the stupid thing to the ground. It dashed itself on a sizeable stone bulging out of the earth and there was a grating snap and suddenly its right hind paw was protruding horribly in an abnormal direction and there was a chipped tooth on the ground. The rabbit was not moving and it would not get up. Yuuya was rather cross that it had already gotten itself broken so early on. He hadn't even been that rough with it. But it was still breathing and looked as though it was going to survive so he decided to adhere to his original plan.

He brought it to his special place and thrust the bunny into the compact cage he kept concealed there beneath a small pile of brown tarpaulins. The container in question was made out of steel and approximately thirty centimeters in height by twenty-five centimeters in width and eighty centimeters in length, the type commonly used to capture large rats and raccoons and squirrels and other such kinds of pests. In other words it was perfect for the things he needed to do. He had previously had it affixed to the ground with some polypropylene straps and a couple of metal camping stakes and he figured if anyone inquired as to the reason he was out in the forest by himself he'd either tell them to mind their own fucking business or that he was out hunting for stag beetles. Kurosaki had asked him if he'd wanted to come one time, but it didn't interest him. The way insects performed did not appeal to him the way most other mammals did, and besides, he didn't think Kurosaki would do anything entertaining with them anyway.

Yuuya sat cross-legged by the cage and observed the rabbit's unconscious form through the wire mesh as it lay there, bleeding. Hopefully it would wake soon. Such a tiny being... so vulnerable, so weak... he had an impulse nagging at his hands and he knew that if he wanted to he could snuff out its life right there and then. But that would not be right. It would not. It would be a waste.

About ten minutes later Yuuya noticed its nose beginning to twitch side to side and its ears beginning to stir and its eyelids beginning to flicker open so he pulled out a flat-head screwdriver from the front pocket of his shorts. With his thumb and forefinger gripping the end of the handle he oscillated it placidly in front of the creature's face as it gradually awoke, before tossing it up and catching it and sticking it into the cage and propelling the blade ever so closer to its cheek, causing it to draw back loudly in apprehension and pin itself up against the posterior wall of the enclosure, and then he quickly moved the tip of the screwdriver up to its eye— before his countenance abruptly changed and he set the tool back down on the ground. Yuuya stared at the doe for a little bit, watching it as it nervously tended to its wounds, looking down and into it and studying it as if it were a petri dish, before he took his hand and forcedly slid it through the door and into its right eye socket and positioned its miniature blackish beady eye right in-between his searching digits. The cage vibrated intensely but it did not lift off the ground. The boy rotated his wrist and pulled. Rabbit blood and other various leporine humors started to seep down his arm and smear onto his clothes so he let go of the rabbit's eyeball, but he realized he had already taken most of it out. Ignoring the stinging cuts on his arm he scoffed and stood up and tossed it aside and ground it into the dirt with the heel of his sneaker. The rabbit was quaking and screaming and rolling around inside the cage but no one could hear it. Yuuya kicked the cage until it stopped making so much noise and then he knelt back down and spoke to the creature.

"Settle down, little one. I'll let you out in just a moment. I promise."

The feeling was growing, and there was no turning back. He wanted to feel it even more. It was time for the experiment. From his bag he produced an old photograph of his family, from before he was born. His father, his mother, his brother, his sister. They seemed so content, so pleased with themselves, it almost looked like the perfect nuclear family. It was sickening.

He slipped it through the holes of his makeshift torture chamber. Then he grabbed his plastic bottle and overturned it, emptying its combustible alcoholic contents onto the cage, soaking the rabbit's fur to the bone, and he took meticulous care in assuring he had doused everything sufficiently. After this a match was lit. He stared intently into the flame, as if daring it to jump at him, and a punctual gust of wind made it shrivel back in response. Satisfied with this he turned his attention back to the animal. It squinted up at him, solemnly shaking, and Yuuya looked in its remaining eye and he saw it begging and pleading for him to release it. To put it out of its misery. "Get ready to run," he said softly. "It's showtime, moon rabbit." He flicked the match away from him.

The cage erupted into flame and shrieks and scarlet tendrils poured out of the openings in the mesh. The boy bent down and felt around a bit behind him to pick up a fallen tree branch and he carefully unlatched the gate, and a spheroid of fire barreled out of the hatch and scampered toward the rocky path up ahead.

He laughed enthusiastically. He was getting so excited his forbidden desires became almost stiflingly painful, as they suffocated any other train of thought. He belted out another shrewd chortle and a "run, rabbit, run," and it was all the more amusing knowing that it had absolutely nowhere to run to. It was an awfully dry summer day, and the nearest stream or brook was decidedly too far out of the way. Not that water would have saved it. He called out to it in a sing-song voice and scrambled to keep up. Kizami gasped for air and stumbled forth an inebriate, arms outstretched, drunk on his own pleasure, and he thought it was like chasing the sun.

A simulacrum of a human, his rabbit was fleeing from the inevitable, but it still ran as fast as it could on one two three good legs, trying to get away, trying to find somewhere, and it was confused and in unspeakable pain and the seven-year-old knew this and it reminded him of the other ones and he felt so, so, so good, and in the deepest recesses of his mind he still could see the afterimage of that desperate imploration in its eyes, that primal desire to survive amidst a disinterested world, and he followed close behind as the dark shape of a rabbit engulfed in a heavenly glow ran against a gust of wind, faster and faster, thrashing and floundering and fanning the flames higher and higher and he saw Haruna and Kouki roasting in those blinding flames, and he smelled the smoke, and he heard the squeals, and he felt the heat of death on his fingertips and at once he knew that his assailed senses were whispering to him the rudimentary truths of the universe and he smiled in recognition of the fact that a life shines its most beautifully and burns its brightest when it is trying, when it is trying not to die, when it is trying to assign a meaningless last-minute purpose to its existence, when it has been reduced to its most animalistic state and its intentions are laid bare for all to see, and just like the rest of them the rabbit was struggling against a fatal disease that had already set in, it was running from a pursuer that had long ago silenced it within the murky confines of its jaws and it was challenging an eldritch certainty that had marked it for slaughter before it had even been conceived as an iota of a thought. Living offensively dishonest lives, they all were beasts too retarded to realize the futility of their self-preserving efforts, somehow clueless of the fact that oblivion never comes unannounced, but still they try, with vacuous expressions plastered sloppily across their faces and vomiting mind-numbingly fake platitudes and truisms, still they try their damnedest to circumvent the will of the universe and its god and finding the answer to their opposition to be a resounding echo of their own distorted terrified screams, and the striking of a match...

...and in each of their final moments there would sometimes come a mutual understanding, the reason for his actions would become clear, and as Kizami chased after the dying animal that esoteric rush of dopamine dispersed into his head and it was the most delightful sensation in the world, barbaric, untarnished, natural, pure.

The small white bunny soon turned a charcoal black, miraculously having changed its color just like a silly magic trick he had once seen. And it continued whimpering and shrinking in size, and eventually slowed and stopped squeaking and shriveled to a halt under the shade of a cypress tree and he thought that maybe its lungs had burnt out. Kizami walked over and bent down and looked into its eyes, or what remained of them. Its legs were still reflexively quivering, the poor thing, and he could tell that it would be dead very soon. In the clouded reflection of the animal's left eye, Kizami was only a formless mass of undeterminable attributes although still he could make out the shining glint of his own toothy grin directed back at him, and he reveled in the knowledge that his unbridled satisfaction would be the last thing it would ever know. He remained, watching its life trickle and sparkle out of the orifices of its face when, suddenly, he realized the rabbit was gone and he was alone.

Kizami's smile vanished, and he went to work smothering the still-glowing embers with a blanket. When the fire was put out he lodged the bundled-up charred form at the base of the tree for the worms. A black ashy stain could be seen on the ground but any trace of that would disappear when the next rainfall occurred. He packed up his things and the child started towards home without so much as a glance back.

…

He fancied he would have himself another rabbit. Perhaps not anytime soon, but he knew he would like to find another rabbit to chase someday, this time a bigger one. And, surely, she would show him the loveliest of displays...


End file.
